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Sunday, January 1, 2017

I’m not
necessarily talking about the woods behind my house, but it seems that most
people, at some point in their lives, have a story about a little patch of
Earth they used to call home. But it wasn’t really their home. It was a plot of
nature nearby that whisked children young and old into a wilderness adventure.

My
childhood friend, Kristi, lived with a vacant lot behind her suburban
development home. I can’t now figure out why there was a small bit of woods in
an otherwise completely developed area, but back then I didn’t care. It was our
outpost. We had elaborate trails and forts and I remember feeling like it went
on forever and if we weren’t careful, we’d surely get lost. There were berries
we pretended to eat to survive, although we were certain they were the
deadliest poison known to Man. I’m sure it was no more than a quarter of an
acre, but while we were there, we were frontier women of the highest class.

Then one
day, the trees were gone. All of them. And then there was a hole in the dirt,
followed by blocks and beams and eventually a fairly generic looking two-story
colonial with yellow siding. By this time, Kristi had moved on to bigger and
better activities like boys and soccer, but I never forgot that forested lot
behind her house.

And now,
because history repeats itself no matter if we want it to or not, there is new
construction happening around our current home.The land does not belong to us on paper, but we have spent a number of
years watching it throughout the seasons. We know where the pools are in the
spring that supply our yard without forty gazillion toads. We know where the
poison ivy grows thick, where the deer walk, and where the hawk lives. We’ve
seen him year after year soaring from his nest in the woods down to the field
to find something to eat.

Now the
field no longer has vegetation to hide the rodents, and I’m not sure where the
hawk will find his food supply. The deer
will need to go elsewhere, and we find ourselves wondering what we’ll see when
we look out the backdoor.

Sad as we
feel about losing a chunk of nature, we know that you can’t stop progress that
doesn’t belong to you and that change, like repeating history, is inevitable.
That house that was built behind my friend? Two really nice little girls moved
in there. They were a great asset to the kickball games we held in the
cul-de-sac.

But the
nature that is in our backyard, under our ownership, isn’t going anywhere
anytime soon. For as long as we are able, there will always be a little patch
of woods in our yard, with trails and forts and the world’s most poisonous
berries. I’ll even go as far as to say that hawks and deer are welcome.

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Karrie McAllister writes and mothers from Small Town, Ohio, where she is also in the running for having the most unrelated part time jobs. Her column, Dirt Don't Hurt, has appeared on numerous Web sites and newspapers since 2005, and this blog is how she keeps track of them all until she can publish another book. Contact her at KarrieMcAllister [at] aol.com